Shadowheart

by Laura Kinsale

  She had finished the parable and gone on to predicting what sort of vermin they might expect to find among the infidels when the storm began to lift, leaving the forest and the grassy verge steaming in greens and grays. Light shone on the watery ruts in two twisted ribbons of silver. Like a frost of snow, hail lay amid the foliage, already beginning to melt. The knight pulled off his helmet and tried unsuccessfully to dry it on his robe. Without speaking, he pushed away from the tree and began to walk again, tugging the horse through small lakes beside the road, his spurs catching in the muddy weeds.

  Vapor rose from his shoulders. Isabelle plucked at her sodden robe, holding it away from her skin as she talked. She was describing the present state of her soul, in considerable detail, when he stopped suddenly and turned to her.

  A breaking shaft of sunlight caught him, banishing the sullen shadows. He looked up at her, young and earnest, interrupting her eloquence. "Isabelle. Tell me this." He paused, staring at her intensely. "If outlaws were to fall upon us this moment, and ransom my life against—" The youthfulness vanished from his face in a set scowl. "Against this—that you take me again into your bed as husband—then what would you do? Would you see me slayed?"

  Her lips pinched. "What vain tale is this?"

  "Say the truth of your heart," he insisted. "My life for your vaunted chastity. What’s best to be done?"

  She glared at him. "You are a sinner, Ruck."

  "The truth!" he shouted passionately. "Have you no love left for me?"

  His words echoed back from the forest, enticement enough to outlaws, but he stood waiting, rigid, with his hand on the bridle.

  She began to sway slightly. She lifted her eyes to the glowing clouds. "Alas," she said gently, "but I love you so steadfast, husband—it would be better to see you put to death before my eyes, than we should yield again to that uncleanness in the eyes of God."

  His gaze did not leave her. He stared at her, unblinking, his body still as stone.

  She smiled at him and reached down to touch his hand. "Revelation will come to you."

  He caught her fingers and gripped them in his, holding them hard in his armored glove. "Isabelle," he said, in a voice like ruin.

  With her free hand she crossed herself. "Let us make a vow of chastity together. I do love you dearly, as a mother loveth her son."

  He let go of her. For a moment he looked about him in a bewildered way, as if he could not think what to do. Then, abruptly, he began to walk again, pulling the horse in silence.

  A cool wind out of the storm caught the knight’s dark hair, drying it, blowing it against his ears. The breeze faltered for a moment, playing and veering.

  The horse threw up its head. Its nostrils flared.

  The knight came alert. He stopped, his hand on his sword hilt. The animal planted its feet, drinking frantically at the uneasy wind, staring at the curve ahead where the road disappeared into deep woods.

  There was only silence, and the breeze.

  "The Lord God is with us," Isabelle said loudly.

  Nothing answered. No arrow flew, no foe came rushing upon them from ambush.

  "Get behind the saddle." The knight shoved his helmet down on his head and threw the reins over the horse’s ears. As Isabelle floundered out of his way over the cantle, he mounted. She flung her arms about his waist. With his sword drawn he drove his spurs into the nervous stallion, sending it into a sprint with a war cry that resounded in volleys from the trees. The horse cannoned along the road with water flying from its hooves, sweeping round the curve at the howling height of the knight’s battle shout.

  The sight that met them was no more than a flicker of red mud and slaughter as the horse cleared the first body in a great leap. The animal tried to bolt, but the knight dragged it to a dancing halt amid the stillness.

  He said nothing, turning and turning the horse in an agitated circle. The butchered bodies of their former companions wheeled past beneath his gaze, around and around, white dead faces and crimson that ran fresher than the rain.

  Isabelle clung to him. "God spared us," she said, with a breathless tone. "Swear now, before Jesus Our Saviour, that you’ll live chaste!"

  He reined the horse hastily among the bodies, leaning down to look for signs of life as the animal pranced in uneasy rhythm, its hooves squelching wet grass and gore. The looters had done thorough work. "God’s blood—they’ve been slain but a moment." His voice was tight as he scanned the dark encroaching forest. "The brigands are scarcely flown." He turned the stallion away, but at the edge of the clearing he doubled the horse back on the grisly scene again, as if he had not looked upon it long enough to believe.

  "They died unshriven," Isabelle whispered, and murmured a prayer. She had never let go of her grip on his arm, not even to cross herself. "Swear now, in thanks for God’s mercy and deliverance—you’ll be chaste forevermore."

  He was breathing hard, pushing air through his teeth as he looked at what was left of Mistress Parke.

  "I swear," he said.

  He yanked the horse around and spurred it away down the road in a gallop for their lives.

  * * *

  Avignon intimidated and disgusted him. In the murky, baking streets below the palace of the Pope, he stood stoically as Isabelle prayed aloud before a splinter of the True Cross. Behind her back a whore with bad skin beckoned to him, striking licentious poses in the doorway, folding her hands in mockery, running her tongue about her dark lips while Isabelle knelt weeping in the unswept dirt. His wife had barely warmed to her devotions, he knew from experience, when the toothless purveyor of the holy relic grew impatient and demanded in crudely descriptive English that she buy it or take herself off. The whore laughed at Isabelle’s look of shock; Ruck scowled back and put his hand on his wife’s shoulder more gently than he might have.

  "Leave these hypocrites," he said. "Come."

  She stumbled to her feet and stayed near him, uncharacteristically quiet as they made their way through the crowds.

  The shadow of the palace fell over them, a massive wall rising sheer above the narrow cobbled street, pocked with arrow slits styled in the shapes of crosses, the fortifications crowned by defensive crenels. Isabelle’s body pressed against him. He put his arm about her, shoving back at a stout friar who tried to elbow her aside in passing.

  She felt cool and soft under his hand. He was blistering hot in his chain mail and fustian, but dared not leave the armor off and untended as they moved from shrine to shrine, kissing saints’ bones and kneeling before images of the Virgin, with Isabelle’s tears and cries echoing around the sepulchers. Now this new shrinking, her snugging against him, fitting into the circle of his arm as she’d been used to do made piety even more difficult to maintain.

  He tried to subdue his lustful thoughts. He prayed as they joined the stream of supplicants forging up the slope to the palace gate, but he was not such a hand at it as Isabelle. She’d always been a chatterer—it was her voice that had first caught his attention in the Coventry market, a pretty voice and a pretty burgher’s daughter, with a giddy laugh and a smile that made his knees weak—he’d felt amazed to win her with nothing to offer but the plans and dreams he lived on as if they were meat and bread.

  But there had been only a few sweet weeks of kissing and bedding, with Isabelle as loving and eager for it as himself, before the king’s army had called him to France. When he’d come back, knighted on the field at Poitiers, full of the future, triumphant and appalled and eager to bury himself and the bloodshed in the clean tender arms of his wife—he’d come back, and found that God had turned her dizzy prattle into prophecy.

  For a week he’d had his way with her, in spite of the weeping, in spite of the praying and begging, in spite of the scolds, but when she’d taken to screaming, he’d found it more than he could endure. He’d thought he ought to beat her; that was her father’s advice, and sure it was that Ruck would gladly beat her or perhaps even strangle her when she was in the full flow of pious exhortation
s—but instead she’d beseeched him to take her on pilgrimage across the heap of war-torn ruins that was France. And here he was, not certain if it was God’s will or a girl’s, certain only that his heart was full of lechery and his body seethed with need.

  They entered the palace through an arch beneath two great conical towers, passing under them to an immense courtyard, larger than any castle he’d ever seen, teeming with beggars and clergy and hooded travelers. The clerics and finer folk seemed to know where to go; the plain pilgrims like themselves wandered with aimless bafflement, or joined a procession that ran twice around the perimeter and ended at a knot of priests and clerks.

  Isabelle began to tremble in his arms. He felt her bones dissolve; she sank from his grip to the pavement, with a hundred pairs of feet scuffing busily past. As her wail rose above the noise, people began to pause.

  Ruck was growing inured to it. He even began to see the advantages—not a quarter hour elapsed before they had a church official escorting them past the more mundane supplicants and into a great columned and vaulted chamber full of people.

  The echoing roar of discourse stopped his ears. The ceiling arched above, studded with brilliant golden stars on a blue field. His eyes kept sliding upward, drawn by the gilded radiance, the vivid color—abruptly the clerk pushed him, and he collapsed onto a bench. Isabelle looked back over her shoulder at him with her hand outstretched and her mouth open as she and her escort were engulfed by the crowd.

  "Isabelle!" Ruck jumped to his feet. He shoved after them. She’d been named heretic for her sermoning more than once. He had to stay near her, explain her to the wary and suspicious. He floundered into a clearing and found himself in the midst of a circle of priests in rich vestments. The robed and tonsured scribe looked up from the lectern with a scowl, the plaintiff ceased his petition and turned, still kneeling before the podium.

  Ruck backed out of the gathered court, bowing hastily. He turned and strained to his full height, a head taller than most, looking out over the massed assembly, but Isabelle was gone. A guard stopped him at a side door and pretended not to understand Ruck’s French, making an obscene gesture with his finger and jerking his chin toward the benches.

  A shimmer of color sparkled at the corner of Ruck’s eye. He turned his head reflexively, as if a mirror had flashed. Space had opened around him. At the edge of it, two spears’ length distant, a lady paused.

  She glanced at him and the guard as she might glance at mongrels scrapping. A princess—perhaps a queen, from the richness of her dress and jewels—surrounded by her attendants, male and female, secluded amid the crowd like a glitter of silent prismatic light among shadows.

  Cold...and as her look skimmed past him, his whole body caught ice and fire.

  He dropped to one knee, bowing his head. When he lifted it, the open space had closed, but still he could see her within the radius of her courtiers. They appeared to be waiting, like everyone else, conversing among themselves. One of the men gave Ruck a brief scornful lift of his brow and turned his shoulder eloquently.

  Ruck came to a sense of himself. He sat down on the bench by the guard. But he could not keep his gaze away from her. At first he tried, examining the pillars and carved animals, the other pilgrims, a passing priest, in between surreptitious glances at her, but none in her party looked his way again. Concealed among the throng and the figures passing in and out the door, he allowed himself to stare.

  She carried a hooded white falcon, as indifferently as if the Pope’s hall had been a hunting field. Her throat and shoulders gleamed pale against a jade gown fashioned like none he’d seen in his life—cut low, hugging her waist and hips without a concealing cote-hardi, embroidered down to her hem with silver dragonflies, each one with a pair of jeweled emerald eyes, so that the folds sparkled with her every move. A dagger hung on her girdle, smooth ivory crusted with malachite and rubies. Lavish silver liripipes draped from her elbows to the floor, worked in a green and silver emblem that he didn’t recognize. Green ribbons with the same emblem laced her braids, lying against hair as black as the black heavens, coiled smooth as a devil’s coronet.

  He watched her hands, because he could not bear to look long at her face and did not dare to scan her body for its violent effect on his. The gauntlet and the falcon’s hood, bejeweled like all the rest of her, glittered with emeralds on silver. She stroked the bird’s breast with white fingers, and from four rods away that steady, gentle caress made him bleed as if from a mortal wound in his chest.

  She turned to someone, lifting her finger to hold back the gauzy green veil that fell from her crown of braids to her shoulder—a feminine gesture, a delicacy that commanded and judged and condemned him to an agony of desire. He could not tear his look from her hand as it hovered near her lips: he saw her slight smile for her ladies—so cold, cold...she was bright cold; he was ferment. He couldn’t comprehend her face. He hardly knew if she was comely or unremarkable. He could not at that moment have described her features, any more than he could have looked straight at the sun to describe it.

  "Husband!" Isabelle’s voice shocked him. She was there; she caught his hand, falling on her knees beside the bench. "The bishop will speak with me on the morrow, to hear my confession, and discourse together as God’s servants!" Her blue eyes glowed as she clutched a pass that dangled wax seals. She smiled up at him joyfully. "I told him of you, Ruck, that you have been my good and faithful protector, and he bids you come also before him—to confirm your solemn vow of chastity in the name of Jesus and the Virgin Mary!"

  * * *

  Isabelle insisted that he leave off his armor for the interview with the bishop. Her brief timidity, her snugging against Ruck for protection, had vanished. All night she’d sat up praying, pausing only to describe in endless particular the triumph of her examination by the clerks and officials. They had heard of her—her fame had really spread so far!—and wished to prove to their own satisfaction that her visions were of God. They had questioned her fiercely, but she’d known every proper answer, and even given them back some of their own by pointing out an error in their orthodoxy concerning the testament of Saint James.

  Ruck had listened with a deep uneasiness inside him. He could not imagine that those arrogant churchmen, with their bright vestments and Latin intonations, had been won over by his wife. Isabelle attracted a certain number of adherents, but they were of kindred mind to her, inclined to ecstasies and spiritual torments. He hadn’t seen a single cleric here who gave the appearance of being any more interested in holy ecstasy than in his dinner.

  He’d slept fitfully, dreaming of falcons and female bodies, waking fully aroused. For an instant he’d groped for Isabelle and then opened his eyes and seen her kneeling at the window next to a sleeping tailor. Tears coursed silently down her cheeks. She looked so radiant and anxious, her eyes lifted to the dawn sky, her hands gripped together, that he felt helpless. He wanted this bishop to give her whatever it was that she desired—sainthood, if she asked for it.

  He dreaded the interview. He was afraid as he’d never been before a fight; he felt as if he were facing execution. As long as that vow had been private, between him and Isabelle, it had not seemed quite real. There was always the future; there were mitigating circumstances; he had not spoken clearly just what he swore to. She might change her mind. They were neither of them so very old yet. Women were erratic, that was known certainly enough. He ought to have beaten her. He ought to have put up with the screams and got her with a child. He ought to have told her that decent women stayed home and didn’t drag their husbands over the face of creation in pursuit of canonization. He watched her prayerful tears, his lufsom, his sweet Isabelle, and could have wept himself.

  In the great audience hall he was informed he must wait, that only Isabelle was required. A hunchbacked man held out his hand, leaning on his staff, and Ruck put a coin in it. He got a mute nod in return.

  All the morning he sat there, feeling naked in his leather gambeson without armor
over it, swallowing down apprehension and despair. There was no way he could find out of the thing short of disavowing his own words and revealing himself a false witness in public, before a bishop of the church. Worse, he was afraid that they might trap him into it, perplex him with religious questions and turn him about like a spinning top, as Isabelle could do, until he swore whatever they wished.

  Three clerks came for him. He rose and followed them through corridors and up stairs, until they entered a high, square room. His blood beat in his ears. He had an impression of silence and intense color, frescoes on all the walls and many vividly dressed people, before he followed the clerks with his head bared and lowered. He went down on his knees before the bishop without ever looking into the man’s face.

  "Sire Ruadrik d’Angleterre." The modulated voice spoke in French. Soft slippers and the gold-banded hem of white and red robes were all Ruck could see. "Is it your will that your wife take the veil and the ring, to live chaste henceforth?"

  Ruck stared at the slippers. The veil. He lifted his eyes as high as the bishop’s knees. Isabelle had never said anything about taking...

  Was she to leave him? Go into a nunnery?

  "He has sworn." Isabelle’s ardent voice reverberated off the high walls. She spoke English, but the interpreter’s French words came like a murmured echo.

  "Silence, daughter," the bishop said. "Your husband must speak."

  Ruck felt them all looking at him, a crowd of strangers at his back. He hadn’t been prepared for this. He felt as if a great hand gripped his throat.

  "Do you understand me, Sire Ruadrik? Your wife desires to take the vow of chastity and retire to a life of contemplation. A placement can be made for her among the Franciscans at Saint Cloud, if her situation is your concern."

  "Saint Cloud?" he repeated stupidly. He lifted his eyes to find the bishop regarding him with an inquisitive look.